Oireachtas committee warns on phone bullying

The Oireachtas will introduce legislation to stamp out mobile phone bullying if operators in the market don’t find a solution, mobile service providers were told today.

Representatives of O2, Vodafone, Meteor and 3 Ireland claimed at the Joint Committee on Communications they were working hard to find a solution but also insisted the issue was a wider problem across society.

Members of the committee claimed technology existed whereby sim cards could be modified to stop indecent images or videos being sent to handsets.

However the operators said that such controls were only compatible with some brands of mobile phones and could not be universally applied across the board.

Fine Gael TD Simon Coveney said mobile phone companies must be willing to install filtering and limiting systems in their products to protect children.

He said Irish children were among the heaviest users of mobile phones in the world and had sent three billion texts in the past three months alone.

“If you don’t come up with a solution, legislators will bring in laws that will. This is something that is being looked at very seriously by legislators,” he told the operators.